Daphne Brooks & P.A. Skantze: a Playlist for Encouragement
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Daphne Brooks & P.A. Skantze: A Playlist for Encouragement [00:00:23] INTRO Duška Radosavljević: Hello and welcome to the Salon. Our guests today are habitual co-thinkers P.A. Skantze and Daphne Brooks, who pick up on previous conversations on the radical potentiality of pop and rock music and of the lyric to reason together on the embodied, the sonic, and the political. Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of a number of academic publications on 19th and 20th-century African American literary and cultural production, Black feminist theory, performance and popular music. The first volume of her trilogy Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity, entitled Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound is out with Harvard University Press in 2021. P.A. Skantze is a Reader in Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University in London, where she also heads the Centre for Performance and Creative Exchange. Her articles include examinations of national identity, the choreography of Bill T. Jones, surtitles and contemporary theatrical performance, gift exchange and creative generosity, Shakespeare and Mabou Mines, gender and motion, the epistemology of practice as research, watching and spectatorship as praxis, and a wealth of work on sound and composition in performance. Brooks and Skantze take their Salon for LMYE, recorded as 2020 drew to a close, as an opportunity to think about what they term ‘sonic encouragement’, to be found in music and in performance. Reasoning through a number of sound cues gathered through their personal and public experiences throughout the year, they forefront an idea of ‘ludic solidarity in the catastrophic’. This conversation took place between New York and Grosseto on the 22nd December 2020. [00:02:38] SALON P.A. Skantze: Okay. Daphne Brooks: Happy Kwanzaa! [Laughter.] PS: Happy Kwanzaa to you! What day is it? DB: I don’t know. I just tend to just take all of December for Kwanzaa. You know, I mean why not? PS: Why not? Hanukkah! DB: Maulana Karenga and his Afrocentric friends designed the holiday during the Black Arts Movement so I figure, you know, it’s a side of improvisation. But at any rate, it is good to see/hear you in the strange… PS: It is so good to see/hear you in these strange, awful times. DB: Yeah, couple of Decembers ago we were all together. PS: We were, we were, talking the sonorous. DB: Yes exactly. And now as our mutual dear friend Fred Moten would say, as he said to me the other night, we’ll have to muddle through somehow, so… PS: Yeah I mean it’s really… So I – and you know this is fundamental to the kinds of questions you and I’ve been talking about for a long time – but you know I was just in the States to visit my brother, and it is just really a moment of where – I mean, what I want to talk a little bit about with you because you’re a person that I don’t have to translate to and I think that’s, you know, an interesting thing. DB: Yes, I feel the same way. 1 PS: It’s the sonic is – like I’ve been thinking a lot about sonic encouragement. And the ways in which, and this partly comes out of the family Zooms that have been instituted since the pandemic, because like so many people it never even occurred to us to Zoom before as a family. And, as you would appreciate highly, our Zooms have come to include instructions like: ‘One person decides the artist or the band and then everyone has to choose three songs.’ DB: Wow. That’s great, that is so great, I love it. PS: And it’s been really like reliving certain ways about how we got through. You know? Like what you’re saying about Fred, how we muddle through but also like how we move through, how we Prince through, how we Rolling Stones through, you know, how we ‘through’ in those ways. DB: Yeah, that’s beautiful, P.A., that’s really, really beautiful. Can I leap in and say that– PS: Please. DB: –I want to lift that formulation ‘sonic encouragement’ – definitely, I want to lift it. I also want to add to our maybe little lexicon that we’re building together here, ‘sonic healing’, which I’ve thought a lot about, and there’s a song that I want to share. PS: Okay. DB: It’s also really a particular performance so you and I will hopefully be able to see it. The reason why I keep coming back to it actually has to do with Radiohead, which is not – I’m not, I’m not playing Radiohead! Although I could. [Laughter.] I have some reasons why I’m not playing Radiohead. PS: Yeah, yeah. DB: I wrote a piece for The Guardian this fall [2020] on the Blackness of Radiohead – ‘The beautiful Blackness of Radiohead’ was the title of the piece – and it was very important to me because Radiohead is a very important band to me, I’ve learned some things that I didn’t know about the band in relation to BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] and the BDS movement from a couple of years ago that makes me quite sad actually. But they’re one of my favourite bands of all time and you know I was writing about the number of Black artists who cover Radiohead – Lianne La Havas has a gorgeous, you know, right, but there’s a ton, right? And I was writing about these ways in which freedom and, you know, rejection of authoritarianism has been embedded in their work for a long time. PS: Yeah. DB: I wrote about it to mark the 20th anniversary of Kid A, and I got the most ferocious racist hate mail– PS: Oh! DB: –that I’ve ever gotten before in my, you know, 20 years of doing public-facing writing from across the Pond. PS: Holy shit… DB: Just a lot of boys who were upset and it, you know, and of course it was in stereo with the white supremacy that– PS: Yes. DB: –has made it put itself on, you know, repeat play at high volume especially these past four years that we know it’s been there. It didn’t traumatise me, and I also understood the importance of not writing back to these people! There was only one person I wrote back to who actually started very innocently and then became more problematic, but he was asking why I was capitalising ‘Black’ in my in my article which is something that I’ve returned to doing. I have an author’s note at the beginning of my book that’s coming out in February– PS: Yay! DB: –where I type out why I made that change. Yes, P.A. Skantze had a had a lot to do with that book getting done in terms of ideas. So – but I didn’t write anybody back, but if I had, this is the song that I really wanted to play just to send a link. [00:07:51 to 00:10:36] ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ (1967) by Otis Redding (recorded live in Cleveland) 2 DB: The version of this that we’re looking at is a performance the night before Otis Redding was killed in a plane crash. PS: Oh god. DB: I can’t make it through this song – I never can make it through this song. And, you know, it speaks to the core tenets of the soul music revolution and, you know, its insistence on claiming the right to the inextricable ways that Blackness and humanity work in tandem with one another in the West and model a kind of ethics of radical care and intimacy. And I just kind of thought, like, what would it mean, [laughter] you know, what would it mean to respond to that level of spontaneous quotidian violence I was receiving on email with a song like this? It would mean extending the tradition that MLK and Baldwin and an entire generation, my parents’ generation, have really put into action on the streets to transform the United States fundamentally half century ago? So it’s a song that I come back to a lot right now as I’m watching, as we’re all watching, what we hope are some fundamental transitions that we urgently need in order to save ourselves. PS: So I have a memory that goes with this song that was an incredibly powerful performance at La MaMa in New York and the whole piece, the whole live performance piece was centred around someone returning again and again to a vinyl record player and playing this song. And it was – because the other thing is there’s something really profoundly beautiful about the fact that just right now, cut off as we are from one another physically, the only thing we can do is try. Right? DB: Yes that’s right, that’s right. PS: You know? DB: That’s true. I mean that, you know, one of the many, many just gorgeous things about this performance that I hold so dear is that it mounts struggle as a site of cathartic energy and infinite potentiality. It’s not an endpoint, it’s always going to be the site in which we continue to make an unmake ourselves.